Speaking Small

Speaking Small

There are moments I would give anything to take back.
Not the big failures.
The small sentences that slipped out before I thought.
The ones that still echo years later.

One of mine happened the day I sat down with the pastor who now leads the church I love.
He was stepping into leadership, and I had been serving there for years.
Deeply involved.
Deeply invested.
Hopeful for what could be.

We were talking about the future.
Dreaming a little.
And then I said something I wish I never had.

It’s only Lexington, Tennessee.
A small church in a small town.
It can only have so much impact.

I wasn’t offering strategy.
I wasn’t offering wisdom.
I was frustrated, and it came out sideways.
I spoke small about something God had placed right in front of us.

You have to understand something about me.
I see scale.
I’m the big-picture guy surrounded by detail people.
And then I usually make them miserable because my mind skips three steps ahead while they’re still organizing step one.
If I open one coffee shop, I’m already building a hundred in my head.

And because the church had been stagnant for a while, that frustration slipped into my words.
The moment the sentence left my mouth, I saw it land on him.
His face shifted.
His spirit tightened.
And I knew instantly I had wounded something I was supposed to encourage.

I’ve carried that moment ever since.
Not as shame, but as a reminder.
Because I have watched that small-town church grow far beyond our zip code.
Across our region.
Across the country.
Across the world.

It still teaches me.
Words carry more weight than we realize.
They can shrink a dream.
Or breathe life into it.

And the Christmas season only sharpens that truth for me.
Because the whole story started in a small town, too.
A quiet night.
A forgotten stable.
A place no one expected anything world-changing to happen.
But Heaven chose it anyway.

God still loves to start big stories in small places.

So I’m learning to speak blessing instead of limitation.
Hope instead of dismissal.
Faith instead of frustration.

Because we never know what God is building right where we are.
And I don’t want my words to stand in the way of the very thing He is trying to raise up.

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